Homeownership is often cited as a gateway to financial and wealth accumulation, so much so that the white picket fence has become synonymous with the American dream and middle-class life. But not everyone has equal access to that dream.

White households are not only more likely to own their homes (as opposed to households of color), but also, homes owned by Black and Latinx households are disproportionately undervalued, which severely hinders the potential for social mobility through housing. Discrimination in residential appraisals has played a significant role in lowering house values for Black homeowners.

Despite the more than 50-year federal prohibition on the practice, racial discrimination in appraisals persists. But the current appraiser workforce is aging, and the industry needs to attract its next generation of workers. As such, policymakers and workforce leaders have an opportunity, and apprenticeships offer a promising avenue to equitably train a more diverse appraiser workforce.

Appraisers are crucial to unlocking appraisal equity

The US Department of Justice, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other federal agencies have noted that the Appraisal Foundation—the organization responsible for setting standards and qualifications across the industry—continues to fail to integrate federal nondiscrimination standards into housing appraisal ethics standards. Though the Appraisal Institute—the largest group of real property valuers in the United States—does include an ethics standard in its curriculum (PDF), its limited scope leaves future appraisers unprepared to handle the potential implicit or explicit biases driving appraisal discrimination.

Without an equitable standard incorporated into their training, appraisers reinforce existing biases and further distort the housing market through biased valuations. Instead of explicitly addressing discrimination, the appraisal industry is currently pursuing solutions such as “color-blind” valuation through machine learning—also known as automated valuation modeling. However, research has shown that this process replicates the status quo’s systemic devaluation of Black neighborhoods.

Though the racial gap in valuations is not driven by appraisers’ racial makeup, more than 97 percent of housing appraisers are white while fewer than 2 percent are Black. With the median age of the current appraiser workforce nearly 11 years older than the national workforce median, the industry has an opportunity to diversify and address inherent bias among the next generation of appraisers, as the Urban Institute has previously recommended.

Apprenticeships present a fresh solution

Apprenticeships, which combine academic instruction with structured on-the-job learning as part of a full-time job, can help transform the appraiser workforce by integrating competencies about housing discrimination and other elements of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility into curriculum. Apprenticeships can also enhance workforce diversity by bypassing conventional recruitment and training methods, creating fresh and rewarding routes to careers that might have otherwise remained vacant. Registered apprenticeships can provide a debt-free path to jobs that pay an average wage of $80,000 for workers and are a strong return on investment for employers.

Housing appraisers are a natural fit for apprenticeship because the industry already requires on-the-job training under the supervision of a certified appraiser. Apprenticeship programs can build on this model by formally structuring and standardizing that paid work experience, linking learning to a related academic instruction, and ensuring consistency and rigor in the experience.

Urban’s new Registered Apprenticeship National Occupational Framework for housing appraisers outlines the core elements of an apprenticeship program and includes a work process schedule and a guide for related academic instruction. The work process schedule directly addresses housing discrimination by including the legacy of redlining and structural racism and an ability to apply those lessons to antidiscrimination law and practice in the core competencies. As with each national occupational framework created by Urban, the appraiser framework—which was developed in collaboration with employers, educators, and workforce training experts—has been approved by the US Department of Labor as a recognized standard for new apprenticeships. Apprenticeship providers can advance their equity goals if they intentionally incorporate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility strategies into program design and delivery.

Understanding how appraisals contribute to bias in the housing market is a crucial first step to preparing the new appraiser workforce to dismantle the legacy of housing discrimination. Although apprenticeship-focused diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts are not a silver bullet, the national occupational framework can work in tandem with other public and private strategies to address the pervasive legacy of systemic racism and housing discrimination.